Marco Beltrami

A prolific, Italian-born film composer who had his start with the teen horror franchise "Scream," Marco Beltrami was raised in the U. S. and underwent intensive musical training both abroad and at Yal...
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Tommy Lee Jones recruited his son as a music supervisor for his latest film The Homesman, because he needed someone to research the sounds of the era for the 19th century western. The actor/director admits he was so impressed with his son's efforts, he also gave him a role in the film.
Jones explains, "He went through the archives of 19th century music that would've been expected in that part of the world. Austin Leonard Jones, who is the banjo player on the barge at the end of the movie, found some very important, rare old songs for us and he worked at that very hard."
And the film's official composer, Marco Beltrami, also aided the feel of the film by inventing instruments that helped to give the music an antique feel.
Jones adds, "We invented several different musical instruments to use. We had a thing called the wind piano. He bought an old upright piano and put it on a concrete platform and from the sound board on the back, he attached six wires and ran them across a creek 200 feet to a 25,000 gallon metal water tank, which was empty.
"He put the microphones inside the water tank, played the piano while the wind blew across the strings. It was a complicated instrument driven for the most part by the wind. And of course there's a lot of wind in the movie! You get sounds that are quite beautiful that no one's ever heard before because the instrument never existed.
"He was quite free in his composition... We had some beautiful images to supply him and the only assignment he had was to be original and have the beautiful music to go with it."

There isn't much of a twist to The Woman in Black's haunted house tale: man goes to a creepy old house runs into an angry ghost and mayhem ensues. That standard horror plot would be fine if the execution were thrilling every scare sending a chill down the spine. But star Daniel Radcliffe's first post-Potter outing has less life than its spectral inhabitants with impressive early 20th century production design sharp cinematography and solid performances barely keeping it breathing. Much like the film's titular spirit The Woman in Black hangs in limbo haunting the quality divide.
Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe) is barely holding on in life having lost his wife during the birth of their child and struggling to stay employed as a lawyer. To stay afloat Kipps reluctantly takes on the job of settling the legal affairs of a recently deceased widow. Living in her home the you-should-have-known-this-house-was-haunted-by-the-name Eel Marsh House Kipps quickly realizes there's more to the woman's life than he realized unraveling her mysterious connections to a string of child deaths and a ghostly presence in the home. Even with pressure from the townspeople Kipps continues his investigation hoping to right any wrongs he's accidentally caused by putting the violent Woman in Black to rest.
Radcliffe bounces back and forth between the dusty mansion made even more forbidding by the high tides that routinely cut it off from civilization and a town full of wide-eyed psychos who live in fear of the kid-killing Woman in Black. Even after losing his own son Kipps' neighbor Daily (Ciarán Hinds) is convinced the "ghost" is a fairy tales while Daily's wife (Oscar nominee Janet McTeer) finds herself occasionally possessed by her dead son scribbling forbidding message to Arthur about future murders. Arthur wrestles with the two extreme points of view but Woman in Black doesn't spend much time exploring the hardships of a skeptic quickly slipping back into standard horror mode at every opportunity. When they have time to play around with the twisted scenario all three actors are top-notch but rarely are they asked to do anything but gasp and react in a terrified manner.
Director James Watkins (Eden Lake) conjures up some legitimately spooky imagery leaving the space behind Arthur empty or cutting to an object in the room that could potentially come back to haunt our befuddled hero all in an effort to tickle our imaginations. But like so many "jump scare" horror flicks Woman in Black relies heavily on the "Bah-BAAAAAAH" music cues obtrusively orchestrated by composer Marco Beltrami. A rocking chair a swinging door and the reveal of a decomposing zombie ghost lady could work on their own especially in such a well-designed environment as Eel Marsh House but Woman in Black insists on zapping a charge of musical electricity straight into our brain forcing us to shiver in the least graceful way possible.
The script by Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass X-Men: First Class) tries to throw back to the slow burn character-first horror films of classic cinema while injecting the sensibilities modern filmmaking. The combination turns Woman in Black into visually appealing dramatically bland ghost story. Radcliffe still has a long career ahead of him as Woman in Black does suggest but this isn't the movie that get people thinking there's life after Potter.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT?
In the late '50s a group of elementary students put futuristic drawings in a time capsule that is then buried on school grounds. One overly obsessed kid Lucinda goes her own way by writing hundreds of mysterious seemingly non-sensical numbers on her entry. Fifty years later it’s dug up and comes into the possession of Caleb the young son of John Koestler a recent widower and astro-physics professor who becomes obsessed with the papers Caleb has brought home from class. He soon discovers the random digits are actually not-so-thinly disguised dates (including 91101 of course) for “future” disasters and there are clearly three of those dates yet to come. Although nobody believes his ramblings about this code for impending doom a nearby plane crash proves he is on to something so ominous the fate of the world could be in jeopardy. With all hell about to break loose the prof takes matters into his own hands.
WHO’S IN IT?
Just a couple of years ago Nicolas Cage starred in Next as a magician who could see into the future and had to prevent a nuclear attack. Now he’s at it again as an MIT professor who also has clues to future catastrophes and also is out to prevent the inevitable. And of course in the National Treasure films he latched on to maps that had contained similarly dark deeply held secrets. Nic clearly likes “knowing” stuff before the rest of us and he’s quite believable even if some of the circumstances in his latest sci-fi adventure are really out there -- literally. Cage somehow makes you buy into this stuff which is key to the ultimate success of the flick. As the key kids Chandler Canterbury as Caleb and Lara Robinson as Lucinda (and later Abby Lucinda’s granddaughter) are properly eerie and haunted-looking. Rose Byrne is also along for the ride as Lucinda’s grown daughter who is able to provide goosebump-inducing information that the numbers alone can’t. There’s also some dead-on creepy emoting from D.G. Maloney as a quietly foreboding stranger who seems to be following Caleb.
WHAT’S GOOD?
Unlike some recent movies of this type with nothing on the agenda but pure mayhem “Knowing” delves into the bigger issues of why we are all here providing something other than just big explosions to talk about on the way home from the multiplex. Director Alex Proyas (I Robot Dark City The Crow) certainly knows how to pull off complex action set-pieces but he and his screenwriters also seem to be genuinely interested in exploring the meaning behind the madness.
WHAT’S BAD?
Some of the more pedantic dialogue Cage is given can be groan-inducing but since he plays John as a total believer we can forgive it. Also the film falls victim to a final act that veers into typical disaster movie territory and isn’t as compelling as the first two thirds which try to keep the premise at least marginally credible. At two hours it probably could have been tightened anyway.
FAVORITE SCENE:
The rain-soaked plane crash sequence with its gritty hand-held photography is riveting to watch and one of the most frightening depictions of a jetliner disaster put on film yet.
GO OUT AND GET POPCORN WHEN ...
If you are really squeamish it might be worth "knowing" that you should take breaks in the big disaster sequences as the CGI effects can get pretty violent and graphic particularly for a PG-13 movie.

Wrote music for the North Carolina Dance Festival and for the Chicago Civic Orchestra

Again worked with Buck Sanders to score Kathryn Bigelow's drama, "The Hurt Locker"; earned second Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score

Once again teamed with Guillermo del Toro for "Hellboy"

Summary

A prolific, Italian-born film composer who had his start with the teen horror franchise "Scream," Marco Beltrami was raised in the U. S. and underwent intensive musical training both abroad and at Yale University, composing music for symphonies and dance ensembles before entering the world of film and television scoring with projects like "Hellboy" (2004) and blockbuster sequels such as "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" (2003). Outside of his genre work, Beltrami held that contemporary film music should include a variety of musical styles and instruments, which he put to use with his critically acclaimed work on the Scandinavian film "I am Dina" (2002) before returning to mainstream films with his traditional sweeping music for "3:10 to Yuma" (2007). After writing the scores for the long-awaited sequel "Live Free or Die Hard" (2007) and the comic book actioner "Max Payne" (2008), he penned the Oscar-nominated music for "The Hurt Locker" (2009), which propelled him onto the upper tier of Hollywood composers.